


Burnt Offering

by Nokomis



Category: Vikings (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-21
Updated: 2013-06-21
Packaged: 2017-12-15 17:21:54
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 762
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/852062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nokomis/pseuds/Nokomis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lagertha does not wish to be alone; Athelstan is always alone. (post-season one finale)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burnt Offering

**Author's Note:**

> Spoilers for season one of Vikings.

Lagertha allows no argument, no weakening protestations about God’s law, when she pulls him into her bed. Her intentions are not carnal, Athelstan knows this, but the roughness of her calloused hands on his considerably softer skin sends tingles through his body that feel remarkably like sin.

“I will not be alone tonight,” she says needlessly as she guides him to her husband’s pillow. 

Athelstan is always alone, now; the Holy Spirit no longer feels as close as it did in the monastery. Sometimes he wonders if it’s the land that’s too far away from God, or if Athelstan himself is the one slipping away. 

(He never felt this devoid of the light during his missionary journeys, what feels like so long ago.)

“Did your sacrifice work?” he asks quietly once the furs have warmed and the flickering light from the fire is the only movement in the room. “The plague abates.”

“But the price is dear,” Lagertha says quietly. Athelstan dares to glance at her; she’s staring straight at the ceiling, light casting strange shadows on her features. “The gods are cruel.”

“All divinity is cruel,” Athelstan says quietly, thinking of Gyda’s pyre and his monastery burning and crumbling burnt pages of his Bible and the pain of his crucifix pressed deep into his palm as he renounced his god only to be denied his release.

“Ragnar would scarce believe this, to hear you speak so ill of your God.” Lagertha, he thinks, is trying to tease him, but her voice is soft and sad. It has been only days.

He looks back, and she’s turned onto her side, and is staring directly at him. “I denied Him at Uppsalla. I tried to do what Ragnar wanted of me. They saw through me.” Sometimes Athelstan thought blasphemous things about his time at Uppsalla, about how their priests had seen into his heart as clearly as Father Cuthbert ever had, possibly moreso.

(Sometimes he thought about the other things he’d experienced at Uppsalla; about the feel of skin pressed against his, about the hazy memory of sin, disjointed as though it had been a dream, and he feels a cold burst of grief as he recalls that Thyri has also succumbed to the plague.

He wonders, madly, if his actions had caused this, if his God was the one that was angry.)

Lagertha’s mouth tightens, and she says, “No good ever comes of denying your gods, priest. They always demand a price for it.”

He doesn’t know if she’s blaming him for what’s happened, or if she’s thinking of her own sins. He chooses to leave it muddled; he doesn’t want to know if Lagertha thinks him responsible for the death of her daughter.

He lets the silence overtake the room before Lagertha speaks again, soft enough that he thinks he might imagine it. “Every time he leaves, I lose something.”

Athelstan does not know how Ragnar will react when he discovers that a plague has taken his daughter. When Ragnar discovered that his unborn son had perished, he had fallen to his knees and buried his head against his wife’s belly, whispering things to her now-empty womb.

This journey has lasted longer than it should, and Athelstan worries that Ragnar will return bearing terrible news of his own. He prays that Bjorn is safe.

He does not consider that Ragnar might have been the one to fall; Ragnar seems to burn with a fire that is not of this world, and Athelstan thinks he would know if that fire had been exhausted from the world.

He has no words of his own to comfort her, so he reaches over, takes her hand, and begins to pray. He does not translate the words; God’s glory means little to her, that much he’s come to accept. She does not immediately quiet him, but lays there, watching the shadows dance as he reassures her the only way he knows how.

“Do these recitations truly help you?” she says eventually, voice sleepy and soft.

“Sometimes,” he says honestly, and the admission feels more shocking to him than attempting to claim the Northmen’s gods for his own. “Only sometimes, anymore.”

Athelstan closes his eyes, squeezes them tight. He doesn’t flinch when Lagertha rakes her fingers through his hair, doesn’t pull away when she presses in close and hums a quiet song he’s heard her reassure her children with. This song is not for him, anymore than his prayers were for her.

He wonders if she’s imagining Gyda is here in his place as he falls asleep.


End file.
